Aimsterville

So, it’s been almost four months since my family relocation, and I’m still unemployed. I have, however, managed to stay busy by:

1. Boning up on my housewifey skills. I cook, I clean, I dust. Occasionally, I launder (clothes, that is–not money) and I arrange things in my apartment, at which point I become displeased and then, I rearrange. I iron–badly. I grocery shop, studiously avoiding Wednesday Senior Citizen Discount Day (because few things are scarier than frenzied seniors with busted shopping carts). And I hate all of it and suck at all of it in direct proportion to my hate.
2. Watching soap operas. Or, at the very least, keeping them on the TeeVee in the background while I engage in most of the housewifey activities mentioned in #1. I’m proud  (or as proud as one can be about such things) that I tuned in for the demise of Guiding Light even though I hadn’t watched it since sometime in the late 1970s at my babysitter’s house and, therefore, I had no idea who the hell any of the characters were. And unless something changes drastically and quickly with regards to my employment situation, I will have my ass firmly glued to my couch when James Franco makes his debut on General Hospital. Neither activity makes me feel particularly good about myself.
3. Not blogging. I have a good excuse for that (really), which I’ll get to below. But let me assure my five readers that I’m so embarrassed about my lack of activity that I took the calendar off the sidebar of Aimsterville. I don’t need any more reminders of my lack of productivity.
4. Showering. I still do that occasionally.
5. Online freelancing. This is my excuse for #3.

I’ve always dreamed of supporting myself through my writing, but online freelancing wasn’t quite what I had in mind. My dreams were always of the “write some best-selling novels and retire to the hills with my Pulitzer” variety. Truth be told, I wasn’t aware that there was such a thing as online freelancing until, in the depths of my unemployment depression, I started researching stay-at-home job options that didn’t involve sending my money to a Nigerian prince or jumping on the promise of making a zillion dollars a day for one hour of work processing online rebates. And I’ve found that there are some legitimate ways to write online and earn money, although at first, you won’t earn very much (My agreements with these sites prohibit me from sharing information about my earnings publicly. But let’s just say that after a month, I haven’t yet earned enough to buy a beer. Not even a really, really cheap one).

Online freelancing, I’ve learned so far, isn’t anything like freelancing for a traditional print publication. And I have experience with neither. One of my dreams as a child was to be a newspaper/TV journalist, but seeing the screaming, biased, no-talent ass clowns who pass as journalists these days has made me thankful that I’ve chosen another path (that path being, apparently, abject unemployment). And I had nowhere to obtain training as a journalist, as my high school didn’t have a school newspaper during the time I was there (one of my teachers tried to revive it, and we printed one edition) and my college didn’t, at the time, have journalism courses, so I focused my meager writing talents on more creative pursuits.

But while not just anyone can send a successful query to a magazine or newspaper and ultimately see her name in print, just about anyone can be an online freelancer to some degree. The trick, apparently, is learning how to do it well. And so I’m writing like hell and immersing myself in learning all sorts of new things like “search engine optimization” and “click-through rates,” and I’m toying with expanding my social networking capabilities beyond Facebook and this blog for the express purpose of promoting my writing. And technically, it’s not even promoting my writing as I don’t make money off my writing per se but rather off the ads on the page. But I guess if I weren’t writing to begin with, then there would be no ads from which to earn revenue, so I guess I am, technically, making money from my writing. This is what I tell myself when I want to sleep at night.

In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the freelancing sites I’ve explored so far and my experiences with them. And I promise this post will be sooner rather than later. Really.